Baked Eggplant Marinara

This blog could also be titled the night we had appetizers for dinner.  I found the recipe from Epicurious.  Epicurious, in case you haven't noticed, is my favorite recipe website.  I like it because they don't use many processed ingredients and they have a wide variety of recipes, often based on vegetables  (they had so many eggplant and acorn squash recipes for example).  This recipe was chosen tonight because it looked easy and it looked like a good way to use eggplant when I was sick of eating eggplant.

All in all, the recipe was quite easy to make.  In essence, it was like eating little lasagna or pizza circles---fried eggplant topped with ricotta, then marinara sauce (I used my homemade sauce) and finished with mozzarella.  I realized when I was past the point of no return that these were meant to be an appetizer, but I decided they could past for a Friday night supper.  It led me to make a tomato basil salad to go with it to make it seem more like a meal.  Curtis and I loved them.  After he had eaten one (or two?) I asked him if this was a pretty good eggplant recipe.  Curtis's response,  "This is eggplant?"  It was that good.  I ate three and I currently can't stand eggplant.  J ate one before we even noticed and was asking for a second.  M proved to be a slightly pickier eater, but I'm going to blame that on being 3---she didn't like the ricotta and she definitely didn't eat the eggplant.  My favorite part of the meal?  I used FOUR!!! of my small eggplant in the recipe.  The recipe says 8 small rounds, but you can really make as many as you want if you have plenty of marinara sauce and mozzarella (I did).  

I will repeat this recipe next time I need comfort food and have eggplant I need to eat.  Now I just need to figure out what to do with my other 4 eggplant!  :)